Ele tentou, ele tentou!

If you a woman travelling in Salvador, a large part of the experience is the inevitable flirtatious encounters with the Salvadorean men. The men here are confident to the point of arrogance; they are brassy, bold, and curious; they have an extravagantly generous sense of feminine beauty; and they are immune to rejection. It is an overwhelming tidal wave to any American woman who's grown up with the hesitant, is-he-or-isn't-he, sideways non-approaches of American men.

If you live here for a while you go through phases of being shocked, flattered, amused, annoyed, and burned-out. And then when you return to the US, American men no longer make any sense to you at all. (If they ever did.)

I first experienced this at age 41 or so on my first trip to Brazil. But I'm 44 now. A lot of mental aging seems to happen between 41 and 44, as you shift mentally from "I'm-almost-still-in-my-30s!" to "okay-I'm-definitely-middle-aged". After a couple years teaching bright-eyed college freshmen who are less than half my age, I've been feeling like a creaky old white-haired professor, and I assumed my Salvador flirtations were over. Not so. Apparently there is no age limit here in Salvador.

Salvador flirtation#1: Last night I finally decided to stop at the tiny bar outside my apartment that has been the source of such happy guitar-playing and exuberant, out-of-tune singing. I'd been a bit intimidated from stopping there because it's such a tiny place, and so completely crammed with people who clearly know each other well, that it requires a certain amount of chutzpah just to thread your way through the close-knit crowd to the doorway. But I was very thirsty, needed some drinkable water, and all the other shops were closed.

Sure enough conversation stopped dead as I inched my way through the tiny clump of tables to ask the bartender if he had any water. It felt like one of those Westerns where the piano stops and everybody stares when the new guy walks into the saloon. Everybody was staring at me. (I felt especially ridiculous just asking for water. But I'd already had too many beers that night.) But it was a friendly, welcoming sort of stare, with lots of smiles, and soon they were all saying "Boa noite!" and welcoming me in. I managed to get my precious bottle of water, exchanged hellos with the four or five people nearby - and then a man zoomed over out of nowhere and kissed my hand. He was off and running, zero to sixty, Brazilian style: "Hello! How are you? What is your name? You are very beautiful! Where are you from? Would you like to dance? How long are you here for? Are you here alone? Are you sure you don't want to dance? Do you have a boyfriend?" All this in about 1 minute.

(American men, please take notes. You needn't do it this rapidly, but the clarity and directness certainly do help matters along.)

He definitely got Salvador style points for saving the do-you-have-a-boyfriend for several sentences in, instead of the very first question.

Unfortunately for him I was truly wiped out from all my walking today, and was still feeling a bit wobbly anyway from my horrible plane flight. So I really just needed to drink my water and didn't really want to dance. I tried to decline as nicely as I could, but he was one of those Extremely Persistent Salvadorean Men. "Are you SURE you don't want to dance? Don't you like dancing? Don't you like music? We could dance the forro! Do you know forro? Look, it goes like this! I'll show you!" He started dancing around the tiny room, miming holding a lady in front of him, wiggling his hips from side to side. Luckily the bartender and his wife both recognized the situation and came to my aid, shooing him away and both whispering to me very kindly (in Portuguese) "Just sit if you want to sit! Just relax! Be at home!"

Everyone else returned their attention to the main focus of the evening, which was hollering along out-of-tune to the guitar player's songs. They got into a long joking song that involved suddenly putting a specific person on the spot to contribute two sentences to the lyrics. It all seemed to be be very off-color and double-entendre since there were many howls of laughter. The bartender tried to explain to me: "It's a word of double meaning. See, the chorus there, it can mean [something something] WALL, but it can also mean the [something something] of a WOMAN! HA HA HA HA!" Hmm, I can only guess what I was missing....

Next up, the man who'd been asking me to dance grabbed the guitar and made a huge complicated announcement that I did not really grasp. There was a general "Ooooooo" of anticipation, and the woman next to me said "Did you understand? He is going to sing a song just for you!" He strummed dramatically (he was actually a pretty good player) and launched into a song at the top of his lungs, and at the first word, everybody started screaming and laughing as they recognized what song it was. "Do you understand the lyrics?" asked my friend. I said no, and she said "It's very romantic." I bet it was, because everybody else was whooping and hollering and pounding the tables. I was laughing along with everybody else because the whole situation was just so ridiculous. But my Portuguese is definitely not at its best when everybody is screaming, laughing and talking simultaneously, so I couldn't understand a single word of the lyrics. The only things I could pick out of the general commotion were "Look, look, she's turning red!" and "The funniest thing is, she doesn't understand what he's singing!" and, at the very end, when he dramatically stopped and stared at me and I stared confusedly back, several people shouting delightedly, "Well, he tried! He tried! You can't say he didn't try!" ("Ele tentou! Ele tentou!") Finally a different woman ran up and gave him a kiss, and I finally figured out the whole song had been about asking me for a kiss.

Sorry, bud, I really just didn't understand a word you were saying!

(That about sums up my career with men in a nutshell, by the way.)

Later (after the laughing had died down a bit and the singers were on to another song), the woman next to me said "Everybody here is family, you know. We are all one family. You are welcome any time," and the bartender added "You have friends in Bahia now. It is easy to make friends in Bahia, isn't it?" I'll say.